Brahmadatta Jataka

At the Aggalava shrine near Alavi, the Buddha learned from Mahakassapa, one of his senior disciples, that the monks there had taken to pestering the townspeople constantly for laborers and materials to build their huts. People had begun fleeing at the very sight of them, and alms-giving in the town had started to decline. The Buddha reproved the monks for their importunity, their relentless pressing for gifts and labor, and told them a story of how the wise once regarded the simple act of asking.

In that former age, when Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into an honorable brahmin family. Having mastered every science at Takkasila, he renounced the pleasures of the senses and took up the bark garments of an ascetic. He withdrew into the high solitudes of the Himalayas, where he lived on wild roots and fruit and won deep meditative absorption.

After many years in that wilderness, the Bodhisatta came down to the land of the Panchalas to obtain salt and vinegar, and took shelter in the royal pleasure garden there. The king of the Panchalas, walking in his own park, was deeply moved by the ascetic's tranquil bearing and downcast, peaceful eyes. He bowed at the ascetic's feet, invited him to remain in the garden as long as he wished, and saw to it that his meals came daily from the royal kitchen. For twelve years the Bodhisatta dwelt there in peace, instructing the king in the virtues proper to a ruler.

As the seasons turned, the Bodhisatta's journeys back toward the Himalayas grew harder on him, for sharp stones and scorching ground cut at his bare feet and left him weak with the heat. He saw plainly that a single pair of plain, single-soled shoes and a parasol woven from leaves would spare him this suffering completely. Yet each time he resolved to ask the king for so small a thing, shame rose in his throat before the words could leave him. He fell silent every time, unable to voice so plain a request even after years of welcome and care.

The king, sensing something unspoken in his guest, pressed him more than once in private to name anything he needed, gold or robes or provisions, promising it would be granted at once. But whenever the two of them withdrew to speak alone, the Bodhisatta's resolve failed him at the final moment, and twelve full years passed with the simple need for shoes and a parasol never once spoken aloud.

At last, as the Bodhisatta prepared to leave once more for the mountains, the king could bear the mystery no longer. He offered him everything he possessed, beginning with the kingdom itself, so that whatever the ascetic wanted might finally be named without the burden of asking resting on him alone. Only then, with the offer already made and the shame of asking lifted from his own shoulders, did the Bodhisatta speak of the shoes and the parasol he had carried unspoken for twelve years.

Before accepting even this small gift, the Bodhisatta explained in verse why he had waited so long. Such is the nature of a request, he said, that it brings either a generous gift or a painful refusal, and those who ask a lord are as likely to weep as those who must refuse them. It was to spare both himself and his host the shame of tears shed where others could see that he had always chosen to whisper so small a prayer only into a trusted, private ear rather than ask it openly.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming the king of the Panchalas as Ananda, and revealing that he himself had been the ascetic who waited twelve years rather than risk another's tears, or his own, over a pair of shoes. He told the monks at Alavi that this was the measure the wise had once set for themselves regarding even the smallest request, and that their own constant demands fell far short of it. Jataka No. 323 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.